The Dandelion

As a communal exercise, a group I belong to recently asked me to think about my “Heritage.”  The assignment vaguely defined heritage as the ancestors who imbue us with values; who define why we are the way we are. It distinguishes relatives from ancestors.  The former is your genetic endowment; the latter a collection of experiences passed down from your forbears that forms your legacy and your responsibility to the world. 

The paper asks:

What story told by your ancestors has shaped you the most?

What family memento speaks to you?

What family recipe should you dig out of your mother's battered old cookbook and make?

The whole thing makes me tired.  I suppose the framers of this exercise could have meant that by ancestors, they meant cultural, collective ones, rather than biological ones. But it doesn’t read that way.  What if you don’t know your ancestors? What if you have no stories, no mementos, no old family recipes?  It seems like one more way in which families like mine --- ones that are made rather than born --- are frozen out.

 My mother died when I was nine, and we lost track of her family.  My dad’s early years were marked by trauma and hardship, and he determinedly looked to the future. Through his own grit and determination, he built a very nice life, and imbued in me a sense of possibility.  But beyond his parents, seriously ill with bi-polar disease and alcoholism, I know no branches of my family tree.

My sons have it worse.  As an adoptive mother, I want my boys to know and honor their biological ancestry as much as they want to and as far as it serves them. But there is not much of that possible.  So, the real work, for them and for me, is to build a non-biological family of love and support and belief in them; a scaffold that gives them the strength they will need to live in this world, and move through it as the best humans they can be.

But boy oh boy, does the world conspire against that.  Every damn year, it seemed, the boys would bring home from school the “family tree” project.  Every damn year, we had to have the same conversation about how to awkwardly wedge ourselves into this thoughtless set of assumptions.  And yes, I tried to talk to the teachers about swapping in something else. Only to be patronized by some earnest young thing who suggested “Just use your family tree. You don’t need to deal with where the boys came from.”  

Really? Just ignore where they come from? In what way does that not make them feel like less than every other kid in their first grade class?

That was how I came to suggest that they just make up their own dream tree.  Which is how Carson, obsessed with pirates and Japan at that time, came to proudly present himself as having sprung from a long line of Japanese pirates. If his teacher (the one who suggested we ignore his heritage) was put off by this, she never said anything. Given how hot I came in that day I visited her, she probably didn't dare.

I know I sound angry.  But I’m really not.  I am not angry and I am not offended.  I will not spend any more time thinking about this than it took to write this.

It’s just that this whole Heritage assignment could have been so much better. If it had been written without the mania for “ancestors.”  Without the assumption that we know them, or at least know about them. With an openhearted acknowledgement that families come together in lots of ways, and the real work lies in making the most of that. 

What metaphor, asks the Heritage assignment, best describes your relationship to your family heritage?

How about this? A dandelion, blowing apart in the wind.  Each fluffy little seed being lifted up on a myriad of breezes; dancing and dispersing and being carried to who knows where in this world.  But capable, in the end, of landing, sprouting and growing something new and worthy and beautiful, wherever they find themselves.